"Monkey
Planet" with Volker Sommer on BBC Radio 4

"Archive on 4" will air
"Monkey Planet" on Saturday 30 Nov 2013, 20:00-21:00.

Fifty years since Pierre Boulle wrote 'La Planete des
Singes' (or 'Monkey Planet' as the English translation was known), Will Self
considers where great apes end and human apes begin.

Boulle's novel, which became
the basis for the movie 'Planet of the Apes' is a playful inversion for a man
whose faith in humanity had been erased by the experiences he described in
'Bridge Over the River Kwai', his other best-seller.

Boulle genuinely wondered
whether human beings were any better than apes, placing him in a long line of
satirists from Swift onwards who drew parallels between the beast in man and
the man in beast.

In the modern era, experiments
like Project Nim explored the idea that a chimpanzee infant raised like a human
baby could be taught to communicate, and be 'civilized' by its contact with
humans. The tragic end of Nim, shipped off to an animal experimentation camp
when he, inevitably, became too violent to control in a domestic setting, did
not entirely end the human fantasy (see Michael Jackson and Bubbles) that
chimps are just like hairy children who will never answer back.

Will Self, whose novel 'Great
Apes' portrayed a world in which apes run the show and make as bad a job of it
as humans, explores the connection between man and his closest living relative,
from Darwin to Nim and King Kong to the PG Tips chimps.